Hair today, shorn tomorrow

Date: September 14 2013

Mik Grigg

We've all been there; you're propped up on the kitchen table with a tea towel around your neck and your mum is coming at you with a pair of scissors. Minutes later you stumble away, itchy with snips of hair inside your pyjamas, and with a fringe that looks as though it was executed, to borrow from Tina Fey, by folding your face in half and cutting out a heart. When we grow up we do better.

On Tuesday night Aaron Chan and Joey Scandizzo celebrated the launch of their Kings Domain barber shop on Toorak Road. As guests were welcomed by Sophie Muckart and Rhiannon Tragear-Ragg (pictured) we wondered, what's the worst haircut you've ever had?

"My mum gave me a mullet," Felicity Schrader said. "She just didn't know how to cut hair. And then I had the fountain on top of my head with a red scrunchie."

Ryan Buckingham reminisced about his mum putting a bowl on his head: "What was she thinking?" he said.

Scandizzo, too, pointed fingers: "My mum used to take me to the hair salon but she would pre-warn the hairdresser. I'd go in and say, 'I want the number two and the undercut, I'm trying to grow the top,' but I'd come out with the same old haircut every time, a number two all over. I hated it, I used to cry."

It's a whole new swag game

At the St Kilda Sea Baths there's something new. On Thursday, Captain Baxter launched its new summer menu. But as plates of tastes began to circulate - king salmon tartare with wasabi pea and cashew crumble (pictured) - what we wanted to know of guests including Angel Tairua (Australia's Got Talent), Caleb Geppert and Jasmin Bell (Big Brother) was … what's new with you?

"The emotional roller coaster of coming out of the [Big Brother] house is completely new," Geppert said. "Having people know who you are, know your name, come up to you, shout out. I'm a fireman so to have that sort of experience has been a completely new thing for me and one of the most wonderful things …not because I want to get a big head out of it but because I get to meet people and make them happy."

Tairua, 13, took a moment to think, "What's new about me? I think, my style," she decided. "I've dramatically changed and become, like, really swag. Or one day I'll be really swag and then the next day I'll be in a nice white dress and everyone will be like, 'What are you doing; are you swag or are you pretty? And I'm like, 'I'm swag-pretty!'"

Tairua's best friend MJ acknowledged that his hairdo was new. "I had an afro," he said. Does your new look make a difference? He laughed, "Yeah, people think I'm a lot more classy now."

A cup, a carnival, ready to run

'My cup runneth over" is a phrase, a way of being, a way of seeing, that belongs to the lucky. The launch of the Caulfield Cup carnival, at Docklands on Wednesday, opens the gates to a season made for luck, for fun, even for love. But what is great now, we wanted to know; where in your life does your cup already run over?

"My marriage," Kate Greer said. "We were married four weeks ago, but we've been together for 3½ years. He proposed in New York, in Central Park. He's amazing, he's a keeper."

The carnival's social and fashion ambassador, Kasia Z, nominated her career and, of course, being involved in the Caulfield Cup carnival. "I'm going to be amongst it all. I'll be on track, I'll be putting some bets on - which I've never done before - and inhaling all of the action. It's spring, the sun is out, life is grand."

"In my relationship [with wife Susan]," he said. "I'm now married and it's just flowing with goodness; it runneth over with goodness!"

Vallejo was perturbed, "Oh, he said the marriage thing? My cup runneth over way before his cup." Vallejo has been married two years, Wren since February. Wren nodded, "Yeah, if my cup was dry now, already, I'd be in trouble."

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